The present invention generally relates to a method and system for generating a road network, and more specifically to continuously updating the road network based upon live feedback from location data generating devices.
In connected vehicles, intelligent transportation or location based service (LBS), road network provides fundamental information to support other services. As used herein, the term “road network” used here refers to a kind of map that mainly shows information about roads and traffic routes, rather than natural geographical information and other information. At present, due to restrictions in aspects such as policies, it is hard to freely obtain and use road network information. Traditionally, users must purchase road network data (purchase in lump, or purchase by use times). Therefore, it is desirable to generate and provide road network in a more convenient and flexible way.
In recent years, positioning functions of vehicles and portable computing devices have been constantly enhanced. For example, many devices such as vehicles, mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDA) are all equipped with global positioning systems (GPS) or other navigation/positioning systems. During the process of traveling along a specific route or line, a vehicle or person can continuously or periodically obtain location data representing a plurality of locations. However, currently, there is no method that can generate road network efficiently and accurately using location data such as GPS data.
First, many users provide their location data voluntarily, but they always do not travel according to pre-planned routes. The uncertainness of routes may cause the location data to be dispersed and irregular. Moreover, the location data provided by the users may have a larger discrepancy and lack basic topological information required for generating a road network. Moreover, the data volume of location data may be rather considerable, which brings challenges to processing speed and efficiency. As a result, it is difficult to generate the road network efficiently and accurately based on dispersed location data.